Elemental Shaman endgame DPS at 80

Elemental Shaman endgame DPS at 80

Posted by Anonymous on Sun, 08/02/2009 - 13:10
Class Shaman

Primary Use

Raiding

Other Uses

Instancing

Build Explanation

Standard Elemental raid DPS build as per 3.1.0. Obviously prioritizes DPS. No talents are picked from the Restoration tree because they do not contribute to your damage output.

Elemental

  1. Concussion offers a straight damage increase, Convection is picked mainly as a filler for later on.
  2. Call of Flame is the only desirable talent in this tier due to the improvement it provides to LvB. The other two talents are either for Enhancement or more suited for PvP.
  3. Reverberation isn't picked because of the small amount of Shocks a Shaman casts over the duration of a fight; all you need is a single FS every 18 seconds. The other two talents are obvious must-haves.
  4. Improved Fire Nova Totem is an obvious PvP talent, Eye of the Storm is picked because it's a decent filler.
  5. All talents in this tier are quite useful. Call of Thunder is the only real must-have, but all of them are decent enough.
  6. Two very good talents, both of which are some of the best in the tree.
  7. Elemental Mastery is, for its single point cost, pretty good. Storm, Earth and Fire isn't all that fantastic, CL is usually something that you use to optimize your rotation in terms of casting speed to get the most out of your FS and leave LvB off cooldown as little as possible rather than a damage upgrade over LB because CL isn't that much stronger. Still, the 60% FS tick increase warrants a pick. (As well as a dire lack of anything better.)
  8. Elemental Oath is quite obviously a great talent, as is Lightning Overload. Both contribute greatly either to your personal or your raid's DPS, so they both get picked up. Booming Echoes is, much like Reverberation, not that amazing, but the 20% direct damage increase on FS makes it better than any other two filler points, I suppose.
  9. Totem of Wrath needs no explanation, I hope. It's probably the best benefit-per-point talent in Elemental, so you get it, period. Astral Shift is a PvP talent for obvious reasons, so it gets left out. Lava Flows, while not amazing, still provides a very nice DPS boost to LvB.
  10. Shamanism is a great talent. Not much to be said here, get it, love it, done.
  11. Thunderstorm isn't all that great for PvE purposes, its damage is pretty average, it's an instant cast spell so it scales poorly with SP and the knockback is only situational in use. (Although in some fights, like Gluth, it has its uses.) Still, the 8% base mana is nice enough, and the lack of anything else worth getting over it at this point makes it a solid 'buy'.

Enhancement

  1. Enhancing Totems is a talent better suited for either a Resto or an Enhancement shaman. Leave it, there are better filler talents to be had in Elemental for those 3 points. Earth's Grasp is a solo/PvP talent, so we're left with the not all that shabby Ancestral Knowledge for a total increase of 10% to your intellect. While not the greatest stat for an Elemental Shaman, there are worse talents.
  2. Get Thundering Strikes. It's the reason you spec into Enhancement in the first place. Guardian Totems is a PvP talent, Imp. Shields isn't as nice as it might sound: you rarely, if ever have mana problems as an Elemental Shaman, so while it might sound good on paper, it's quite useless. Imp. Ghost Wolf is another PvP talent, so leave that as well.
  3. Elemental Weapons provides us with a small SP bonus, so we might as well get that, and our final talent is spent on the (for the raiding Elemental Shaman) utterly mediocre Shamanistic Focus. What with the infrequency of our FS casts, we might as well have left it out, but we have to spend that point one way or another.

Unfortunately, the Elemental tree leaves much to desire in terms of customizability. There are no hard choices in the tree, you can get all the worthwhile pure DPS talents and still end up with enough points to get everything you could ever want out of the Enhancement tree (with the possible exception of Enhancing Totems, but whatever). Mess around with the lesser filler talents if you wish, but the problem is that there's nothing truly worthwhile to get. You can't sacrifice some minor DPS upgrade (20% more upfront damage to FS? Shove it, that's terrible.) for utility, because there aren't any talents to provide that, unless you would spec into Resto. That is, however, in and by itself ridiculously stupid, because you're no healer, you're ranged DPS, period. In the end, Elemental is condemned to serving only one spec: a cookie-cutter one.


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